# @juleswaller_ on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DbKNRPAE2MA
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/68338535-juleswaller-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/9709608bad.jpg
- **Posted:** 2026-07-24T02:50:41.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Julie Waller (Jules) | School Refusal Support (@juleswaller_) — https://gondola.cc/juleswaller_

## Caption

I’m university trained in mental health. 
Social work. 
Years of study on how people heal.

And I still spent years being told the same thing every parent of a school-refusing kid gets told. 
🔸Reward the good days. 
🔸Push through the resistance. 
🔸Give it time.

None of it worked. 

My daughter missed over 100 days of school (in one year alone), and I watched “the right advice” fail her again and again.

So I did what my training taught me to do when something doesn’t add up - I went looking outside the standard playbook. 

Not because I doubted the professionals. 
Because I was living something they weren’t trained to see.

What I found wasn’t complicated. 
Her body was stuck in alarm mode, and no amount of reasoning or reward could reach a nervous system that thinks it’s under threat. 

Every piece of advice we’d been given assumed her brain was calm enough to listen. 

It wasn’t.

Once I understood that, everything changed. Not overnight - but in the right order. 
🔸Calm first. 
🔸Then connection. 
🔸Then, slowly, school.

She’s now at the university of her first choice. 

I built everything I wish someone had handed me back then into one system - using my training, and everything I learned the hard way that no textbook taught me.

Save this for the morning you need it. 
Send it to a parent who’s stuck where I was.

- Jules ❤️

#schoolrefusal #schoolstress #schoolanxiety #teenmentalhealth #childrensmentalhealth

## Stats

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- **Likes:** 8
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## Tags

schoolrefusal, schoolanxiety, schoolstress, teenmentalhealth, childrensmentalhealth

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